Abstract

[From the Introduction]. Although European labour law and welfare systems differ (Ferrera 2000), featuring the characteristic traits of various models of capitalism and national systems of industrial relations (Mendras 1999, 235 ss.; Regini 2000, 13 ss.), they represented a convergent response by governments and states to the bewilderment and anxiety of the post-war period; in the collective imagination, they meant an answer to a widespread need for certainty, protection, and also identity, often collectively perceived and experienced via participation in trade unions, political parties and other institutions of representative democracy. There was nothing comparable in the USA, where the demand for security after the Second World War only led to a surrogate of the systems we have in Europe; a surrogate represented by systems of company protection and stable employment in those enterprises, steadily decreasing in number and size, in which trade unions were capable of protecting workers on the basis of mere power relationships and supporting legislation (going back to the New Deal) which bore in itself the seeds of its own weakness. This need for protection led to a conscious sacrifice of a large amount of individual liberty in the whole of Europe, in the sense that nation states and collective representations were delegated with providing an umbrella of legal and contractual rules, the individual power to modify which was intentionally limited.... I will confine myself to pointing out a few of the critical factors produced by the phenomenon that has effectively been summed up in the phrase "universal deregulation" (Bauman 1999), one of the most widely debated epiphenomena of which is the digital economy. I use this term in a purposely generic sense without any technical meaning, as I am conscious of complex implications and necessary distinctions which it evokes (process of real de regulation, but also re regulation, flexible regulation, flexibility etc.) (Sciarra 1999, 369 ss., Regini 2000, 52 ss., Collins 2001, 205 ss).